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Who coulda guessed that?

Submitted by gjohnsit on Mon, 08/13/2018 - 10:44pm

Before states began legalizing marijuana we were all told by official sources that legal weed would trigger the End Of Days.
Pot smokers, OTOH, said cops would spend their time catching real crooks instead of arrested peaceful pot smokers.
Guess who was right?

Now, a new study shows that legalization has “produced some demonstrable and persistent benefit” to police departments in the two states, seemingly by freeing up resources for officers to solve more serious types of crime.

“Our models show no negative effects of legalization and, instead, indicate that crime clearance rates for at least some types of crime are increasing faster in states that legalized than in those that did not,” the authors wrote in a study published in the journal Police Quarterly.

The researchers used FBI data on Colorado and Washington from 2010 to 2015 to study crime clearance rates, a measurement of how many crimes are solved by police. Before legalization, crime clearance rates were falling in the states. However, the rates seemed to stabilize and then increase following legalization—an effect not observed in the 48 other states.

The loser potheads were right while all the highly-paid experts were wrong?
Is this opposite day?
That can't be right. The Police Quarterly must be some hippie rag that hates cops.

Marijuana arrests dropped 90% in Washington in a single year.
With a whole bunch of free time on their hands, cops used it to help their communities rather than hurt them. What a crazy idea.

Well, legal marijuana will cause people to show up to work stoned, because REASONS.
That will cause a lot of people to die in workplace accidents.

Workers appear to be safer in states that have legalized medical marijuana, according to a new study.

The research, scheduled to be published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in October, is the first of its kind to explore the relationship between medical cannabis laws and workplace fatalities.

Analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1992 to 2015, a team of researchers found that workplace deaths declined by about 34 percent five years after a state legalized medical cannabis. The trend was most pronounced among workers between the ages of 25 and 44.

Could 40 years of drug war propaganda be wrong?
Well, it's not too late to know.

Marijuana busts increased last year, with nearly 600,000 people being arrested on a possession charge—a staggering number that costs taxpayers billions of dollars even as the vast majority of Americans support legalization of the drug.

The new arrest data, released Monday by the FBI, comes at a time when nearly 30 states allow the drug for medical use and eight have legalized it recreationally.

“It’s really shocking in this era that these numbers are so high,” said Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance. “It really makes you question why law enforcement is wasting resources and locking people up for personal use of marijuana.”

To make the arrest numbers to go up, while more and more states legalize, they must be arresting people at a crazy level in the South and Midwest.

Meanwhile, the Northern Mariana Islands legalized this week.
A number of states are expected to vote on marijuana-related bills this year, including Utah, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Michigan.

The Blood Feud That Launched the War on Drugs
The bizarre partnership between Nixon and TV host Art Linkletter, and the shared enemy that brought them together.

*

Linkletter had a reason to hate drugs, and in particular Leary, too. He was a father of five, but his youngest child, Diane, had committed suicide two years before. She had been 20 when she jumped to her death from a sixth-story window. He had gone public with his grief after his daughter’s death, lashing out in anger at LSD, the drug he assumed had caused her to die.

“It wasn’t suicide, because she wasn’t herself. It was murder … she had a tiger in her bloodstream.”

An autopsy revealed no drugs in his daughter’s system, but Linkletter insisted that she had been tripping on acid when she made her leap. He had launched an anti-drug crusade and focused his anger on one man: “Leary called LSD ‘God’s greatest gift to man…’ And when somebody like Timothy Leary comes out and justifies it, we have got to jump on him with hobnailed boots.” It was this feud with Leary that caught Nixon’s attention.

“It’s really shocking in this era that these numbers are so high,” said Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance. “It really makes you question why law enforcement is wasting resources and locking people up for personal use of marijuana.”

“It’s really shocking in this era that these numbers are so high,” said Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance. “It really makes you question why law enforcement is wasting resources and locking people up for personal use of marijuana.”